Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World Book

HAPPILY, HEGEL

kept a diary during his formative years which chronicled in nauseating detail every thought, experience, conversation, snippet of insight gleamed from his voracious readings of any book he could slap his paws on. On any given day an entry would catalogue an exact itinerary of his comings and goings, including detailed opinions on any theater showing or musical performance he happened to catch as well as painfully purple descriptions of the weather. And if for some unforeseen reason a day's entry was lacking his usual microscopic notation, he would shamefully scrawl out an exhaustive reasoning for why he had failed in maintaining his gargantuan expectations of his own pedantry.

shared a sickly symbiotic relationship with his sister which only ended in tragedy for the poor woman who could never accept other women in her brother's life; all of this leading to her spending the last years of her brother's happy marriage as a raving, immobile mass on a couch until she took her own cue from Hamlet's Ophelia and drowned herself in despair over her brother's death.

constructed a crystal palace in his mind and called it a philosophy of everything. Based on the seemingly simple notion that to strive to think about something of course will lead you to also think of its opposite, nothing (in other words, you can't think of happy without also thinking of sad); and that to compose a truth one must find the synthesis of the two (in the case of something and nothing, the synthesis would be being). With this tinkertoy equation in mind Hegel filled page after page with axioms like Lincoln logs, creating a tower which only ever reached nowhere.

wrote in a butchery of German, a mutilation of syntax, a masturbation of muddled thoughts; and in return was rewarded with baffled applause, sycophantic academic kowtowing, and a crown of intellectual celebrity that was placed upon his downward turned brow (after all, he always was a bookish man).

was absolutely loathed by the pragmatic sourpuss Schopenhauer.

wrote insufferable love letters to his future wife in the same awful rhetoric-drunk (that is, his own liberal - to possibly stretch the term past politeness - sense of rhetoric) prose that packed his bloated buch, The Phenomenology of Spirit which allegedly explains his claim to fame, the dialectical system.

gave terribly boring and wholly impenetrable lectures that forced migraines upon even his most fervent admirers, and, in fact, was only ever considered an interesting and lively speaker during his final lecture, which was actually just a symptom of the early fevers of a fatal bout with cholera.

died without knowing that his philosophy, which squashed the individual and tried to seek beauty in the hegemony of authority, would go on to inspire the monsters who put people in furnaces by the millions and painted the sky with ash, because he would have been appalled that his bad poetry of his own thoughts (which were never based on any real reason) would have eventually caused such atrocities. And so it's important to remember that within the crystal palace of his mind, Hegel only ever composed, happily, for Hegel.